TWELVE NEW STUDIES ON GULF WAR VETERANS' ILLNESSES FUNDED BY ...Pretreatment with PB mimics the action of a nerve agent in that PB binds to AChE, ... The project at the TNO Prins Maurits Laboratory in the Netherlands is ...
http://www.gulflink.osd.mil/med_factsheet_121097.html - 23k - Cached - Similar pages

on slime mold:
my botany book discusses it under Kingdom Protista
and not Fungi:
Phylum Chytridiomycota?
interesting.

What it shows in Johns link wrapped around the
villus hair looks more to be bacterial to me.

However, I thought I
would share some info from my book on the slime molds:

"In the Ripley's Fair at the Chicago Worlds Fair in 1933, there was an exhibit of "hair growing on wood." The "hairs," while indeed superficially resembled short human hair, were actualy ...slime mold.

These organisms are totoaly without chlorophyll and are incapable of producing their own food.
They are a bit of a puzzle to biologists because they are distinctly animal-like during much of their life cycle but also distinctly fungus-like when they reproduce.

The tiny, roundish spores of the more thn 500 species... average only 10 to 12 micrometers in diameter and are individualy invisable to the nakd eye. Nevertheless, they are present nearly everywhere and are especially abundant in airborne dusts.

If you place almost any dead leaf or piece of bark in a dish and add a food source, such as a few dry oatmeal flakes to a drop or two of water, the odds are that slime molds...will germinate in as little as 15 minutes...
Within a few days, a glistening mass of active slime mold protoplasmic material, looking something like the veins of a leaf will appear.
(and I can scan the pic and download if any one wants to see it)This material whose "veins" tend to merge into a fan shape at its leading
edges, is a slime mold plasmodium.

If the plasmodium is examined with a microscope, it becomes apparent that there are no cell walls present. The protoplasm in the veins, particularly toward the center, flows very rapidly and rhythmically. The protoplasmic movement may stop momentarily at regular intervals and then resume its flow, sometimes in the opposite direction.

Plasmodia are often white, but they also may be brilliantly colored in shades of yellow, orange, pink, blue, violet, (I have seen violet), or BLACK(what do you know?A few are colorless and more or less transparent....
Plasmodia tend to flow forward at a rate of up to 2.5 centimeters (1 inch0 or more per hour, often against slow moisture seepage, feeding on bacteria and other organic materials. They contain mny diploid nuclei, all of which divide often....

Dramatic events take place when significant changes in food supples, available moisture, light, and other environmental features occur. The plasmodium usuly is converted, often quite rapidly, into many seperate small sporngia,each containing thousands of minute one-celled spores. The sporangia often are globe shaped, but in some species, they develop as long or wide stationary bodies that may resemble a jumbled network of tubes, or they may resemble erect hairs or end up a shapeless blob. The sporangia may or may not have slender stalks, depending on their species. Others exhibit combinations of body forms. The spores are often distributed throughout a jumbled mass of threads called a capillitiium.

When a spore is formed, a single nucleus and a little cytoplasm become surrounded by a wall. Meiosis takes place in the spore, and three of the four resulting nuclei degenerate. When the spore germinates, one or more amoebalike cells called myxamoebae emerge. Sometimes thes have flagella, in which case they are called swarm cells.... sooner or later they function as gametes, fusing in pairs andforming zygotes. A new plasmodium usually develop from the zygote.....

Last edited by Linn on Wed Apr 12, 2006 8:05 pm, edited 3 times in total.

"How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant of the weak and strong. Because someday in life you will have been all of these".

"How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant of the weak and strong. Because someday in life you will have been all of these".

Overall Objective: Chronic exposure to organophosphate insecticides or chemical weapon nerve agents can produce abnormalities in brain function in experimental animals. The objective of this project is to evaluate the cognitive effects of exposure to an organophosphorous (OP) chemical in rats and monkeys. The long-term goal is to identify the underlying biochemical mechanisms of brain damage due to OP exposure. In this study, rats and monkeys are injected with diisopropylfluorophosphate (DFP), an OP chemical which is not a military nerve agent. Animals, that are trained to perform various memory tasks, are exposed to DFP for two or more weeks to determine if exposure causes learning or memory deficits. In addition, the animals will be given drugs that are being developed for Alzheimer's disease patients, to determine if the memory impairment caused by an OP chemical can be reversed.

"How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant of the weak and strong. Because someday in life you will have been all of these".

PS I think this (plasmodium)is what I remembered reading about the hair like organism, and most likey what was in thay jar of spaghetti sauce.
iggy!

"How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant of the weak and strong. Because someday in life you will have been all of these".

Excellent London!
and the descrirtion of the threads: Capillitium and Pseudocapillitium
interesting.
London tam provided article on gulf war studies,
do you know off hand the basic symptoms?
I wonder hw mny people have morgs that were in gulf war?

"How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant of the weak and strong. Because someday in life you will have been all of these".